Traditional and modern food and drink from Georgia and the Caucasus

Breads and Grains

Corn grits are a staple across western Georgia, where you’re likely to find them piled on a plate with slices of smoked sulguni cheese sticking up from their depths like sharks’ fins. In Georgian, plains grits are called ghomi, while grits with cheese mixed in are elarji. I love serving them with Spiced Meatballs and Pomegranate Gravy, shishkebabs of any sort, or garlicky roasted chicken.

When I was growing up, the only time meatballs ever showed up on the table was at Christmas, when one of my aunts would make several pans worth of Swedish meatballs in their creamy, slightly sweet gravy. I got it into my head that making meatballs must be labor-intensive, because why else would these little balls of heaven that everyone loves only be made once a year?

I never really questioned this assumption until I watched a Russian acquaintance in Moscow make meatballs for her family’s weeknight dinner. She threw together the ground meats and an egg, tossed in some salt and a couple of spices, rolled out the balls while we chatted, and fried them up. The whole process took maybe 40 minutes, including the time it took her to grind the meat herself in a grinder she clamped on to her counter.

Years later in Georgia, I discovered abkhazura, meatballs from the mountainous region of Abkhazia spiced with tart barberries, red chili pepper, ground coriander, and other herbs. I created this recipe with those zingy flavors in mind, adding panko breadcrumbs for extra tenderness and a pomegranate gravy as a culturally appropriate nod to the saucy meatballs I loved as a child.

I love to ladle these meatballs over cheesy grits, a common side dish in western Georgia, but they go just as well over rice or noodles. They’re easy to take to work and reheat in the microwave, too. Serve them with garlicky roasted kale or a peppery arugula salad.

Spiced Meatballs with Pomegranate GravyMakes approximately 25 meatballs, enough to serve 5-8 people

Combine the meats, bread crumbs, garlic, onion, egg, and spices in large bowl and mix thoroughly. (Using your hands for this step is the best way to get everything evenly incorporated.)

Roll small handfuls of the mixture into golf-ball-sized meatballs, about 1 ½ in. in diameter.

Heat the butter or oil in a large, heavy-bottomed skillet over medium heat. (I use a cast iron pan. Nonstick pans are not ideal because they prevent the meat from browning properly.) Add the meatballs in batches, turning to brown all sides, about 6-8 minutes. (The key here is not to crowd the meatballs: if they’re too crowded, the meat will steam rather than sear.) Transfer the meatballs to a plate lined with paper towels.

Make the sauce: Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter or oil in the same pan. Sprinkle in a tablespoon of flour and let it cook for one minute, stirring often. Add ¼ cup of the pomegranate juice. Scrape the browned meat bits off the bottom of the pan with a spatula and mix them into the juice. Gradually add the rest of the juice, whisking to make sure no flour lumps remain.

Finish cooking:Reduce the heat to low and add the meatballs back into the gravy. Cover and cook another 12-15 minutes, turning the meatballs once at the halfway point, until they are cooked through.

I first tried Georgian khachapuri (bread stuffed with salty melted cheese) in Moscow, where I found it at a street stand on a frigid, grimy morning in March. Fresh from the oven, it warmed my hands through my gloves and the molten cheese and buttery dough seemed to start insulating me from the cold almost as soon as I swallowed the first bite. From then on, I became a regular, at least until I stopped being able to fit comfortably into my jeans and had to take a temporary hiatus.

Khachapuri is arguably Georgia’s most celebrated national dish and one of its most recognizable cultural exports, at least among the countries of the former Soviet Union. The sort I’d tried in Moscow is known as penovani, the most popular street snack variety from Ukraine to Tajikistan. It substitutes puff pastry for the more traditional bread dough and comes apportioned for one. There are also several regional varieties: the classic imeruli (a flat, round pie stuffed with cheese, from the central region of Imereti), megruli (pretty much the same as imeruli, but topped with an extra layer of cheese, from the western Megruli region), and the decadent ajaruli khachapuri, which hails from the Ajara region on the Black Sea coast.

Ajaran khachapuri is essentially a breadbowl encompassing a molten lake of oozy, salty cheese and a poached egg. It is typically shaped like a boat or an eye, the egg’s yolk a sort of sunny pupil. I first tried it on a sweltering August afternoon after a sticky four-hour bus ride from another city—not the ideal conditions for this dish. (There were no other choices at the time.)

January, however, is another story. There’s nothing like biting cold (or a nasty hangover) to make you crave stick-to-your-bones food like this. Make it for a weekend brunch or your next snow day. It’s so filling you won’t need much on the side: just coffee and some grapefruit or orange juice to cut the richness.

Note the amount of eggs called for in various steps here: you will use a full dozen eggs to make khachapuri for six people.)

Ajaran Khachapuri (Hot Breadbowl with Cheese and Egg)Serves 6 as a main courseTime: about 2 and a half hours, largely unattended

In a large bowl, combine the yeast, sugar, and warmed milk. Let stand for 5-10 minutes, until the mixture becomes foamy.

Add the melted butter, egg, flour, and salt and mix well to form a soft dough. (You’ll probably need to use your hands at the end to get everything thoroughly mixed.) The dough will still be fairly sticky but should pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 2-3 minutes, adding only enough flour to keep it from sticking.

Roll the dough into a ball and put it in a large buttered bowl, turning to coat. Cover the bowl with a towel and set it in a warm place to rise until roughly doubled in size, about 1 ½ hours.

Thirty minutes before you plan to bake the khachapuri, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line two heavy-duty baking sheets with parchment paper or aluminum foil.

Punch the dough down and divide it into six balls. Working one ball at a time on a lightly floured surface, roll each one into a circle about 10 inches in diameter. (You can also hold the dough in the air, turning it constantly and letting it stretch itself out: watch the video below to see my Georgian host mother’s technique.)

Roll the edges inward loosely to create an “eye” shape roughly 7-8 inches long and 4-5 inches wide in the middle. The rolled dough around the edges should be about 1 inch high. Twist the edges together at the ends (the corners of the eye) and press the twist down with your thumb to “seal” them. Transfer each khachapuri to the lined baking sheets and let them rest about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix the cheeses, yogurt, beaten eggs and salt together in a small bowl with a fork. Once the dough has rested, spoon some of the filling into each one (enough to fill them but not so high that it might overflow in the oven).

Beat 1 whole egg with 1 tsp. water to make an egg wash. Use a small brush to coat the sides of each khachapuri generously with it.

Bake for 12-17 minutes, until the crusts begin to turn golden. Remove the khachapuri from the oven. Use a spoon to make a 3-in. diameter well in the center of each khachapuri—you’ll need to crack the surface of the cheese to do this.Crack a whole egg into each well. Return the khachapuri to the oven and continue baking until crusts turn deep golden brown, another 6-8 minutes. The egg whites should be fairly opaque but still wobbly, the yolks glistening. (The eggs will continue to cook in the hot cheese after they emerge from the oven.) Serve each khachapuri on an individual plate.

To eat: Use your fork to mix the egg thoroughly into the cheese. Cut pieces of crust from the inside rim first, swirling them through the filling like fondue. Then move to the outer rim and the bottom.

Serving note: If you like, sprinkle the khachapuri with black or red pepper, smoked paprika, or chopped greens (cilantro, parsley, basil, mint, dill). If you prefer a spicier version, mix some ajika into the cheese while it’s hot. A light salad of cucumber, tomatoes, and red or green onions on the side would complement the rich khachapuri nicely.

Prior to moving to Georgia, I had no idea what a huge role bread plays in the country’s culinary heritage and the day-to-day life of the people. It is present on the table in some form or another at nearly every meal, and, for poorer families, it may make up the majority of the day’s calories, along with potatoes.

While low, oblong loaves of European-style white bread are available in most corner grocery stores, it’s worth going out of your way to find a streetside bakery where traditional flat, diamond-shaped loaves are baked on the inner walls of a tone (to-nay), or earthen kiln. The day before leaving Batumi, I stopped by one of these to watch the baker at work and learn all I could about the process.

Baker Timur Jikhadze in his shop in Batumi

Temur Jikhadze has been baking tonis puri (kiln bread, also known as shotis puri) for 35 years so far, and has no plans of stopping anytime soon. He picked up the craft on the job as a young man and now, he says, “I can make anything out of dough.” I don’t doubt it. His calm and practiced movements between the table where he forms the loaves and the kiln where he bakes them put me at ease: my questions and clarifications seem not to faze him in the slightest.

Every morning, he makes a basic dough of flour, yeast, water, and salt, letting it rise in a plastic tub while the kiln heats up. I was imagining him standing there in the flour-dusted dawn light, stoking up a roaring fire, but in actuality he just plugs the oven into an industrial-size outlet. Jikhadze admits he should come in earlier than he does (around 7:30 am), because it takes an hour and a half for the kiln to reach proper baking temperature. But Georgians on the whole tend to be late sleepers, it seems to me, so I can’t imagine he’d do much business before nine o’clock anyway.

After punching down the dough and letting it rise once more in evenly shaped mounds atop his table, Jikhadze stretches each loaf individually across an oblong form–a wooden board on the bottom piled with a hillock of foam and covered with cotton cloth. He pokes a hole in the center of the dough with his finger, then sticks his thumb into a small opening at the side of the form, removes the kiln’s metal cover, places a folded towel on its rim to shield his skin from the intense heat, and smacks the form onto the inner wall of the oven, leaving the dough clinging to the bricks where it will puff, blister, and brown in 6-8 minutes, depending on how close he has placed it to the source of the heat, near the floor.

The salt, he says, is a key element. Too much and the bread won’t taste good; too little and the dough won’t stick to the wall of the oven while it bakes. To place loaves deep inside, short-statured Jikhadze must launch himself bodily into the kiln, using his hips as a lever and letting his feet float up off the ground. He smiles wide when I show him the photo I’ve captured of him in this precarious position.

Into the tone he goes!

The baker must keep mental track of how long each loaf has been baking and when he must remove them using two long wooden sticks, one with a metal hook at the end to poke through the hole in the center of the bread, the other with a metal scraper to pry it gently from the bricks. He transports it on the end of the hook to slatted wooden shelves in the corner, where fresh loaves are cooling. Meanwhile, he distributes loaves for 70 tetri (about 40 cents) each to customers who appear every 3 minutes or so at the open door. He makes change from a flour-dusted matchbox sitting in front of his dough scale.

Removing the bread from the tone

Most Georgian families don’t buy these loaves for their everyday bread, reserving them instead for special meals or those with some kind of ritual meaning. Jikhadze sends me home with a steaming loaf of my own, which I nevertheless can’t help but devour straight out of its plastic bag as I make my way along crowded, exhaust-choked Chavchavadze Avenue. Usually I hate traversing this stretch of the city, but it’s a testament to the quality of Jikhadze’s work that today, I hardly even notice the annoyances.

If you visit:

Follow your nose to the tiny bakery at Giorgiashvili St. 6 in Batumi, not far from the port. Don’t leave without also trying one of the penovani khachapuri, a hot pocket of buttery puff pastry stuffed with melted cheese.